What does hollister represent

A sign for the high-school homecoming dance advertises its theme: A Disney Ball. On this visit, I remembered it being close to the town center, and, sure enough, I found it easily. But something seemed different.

I parked and looked more closely. So I walked up the left-leaning white steps, noting that the sculpted cherubs on the front portico had been repainted without great care. Great Deals. In the lobby, on a low table, there was a tidy array of brochures and business cards for taxi operators, churches, faith healers, and purveyors of bail bonds.

Enriching, Developing, and Empowering, the Human Potential. But there was no one inside. A thumping. I followed it down the hallway to a door. Voices could be heard amid the hip-hop, and for a second I was so happy to know that there was someone in this building that I thought about going inside. But instead I left. On the front lawn, under an old willow, I stood with no clear idea of what to do.

I watched a man across the street cutting his grass and I cycled through a series of conclusions and emotions. I was saddened by the state of the building. The interior was gloomy, and the tenants seemed temporary and uncommitted to the upkeep of the building. And I cared about this why? For years, employees of Hollister stores, during orientation, were given the story, and it goes something like this: John M.

Hollister was born at the end of the nineteenth century and spent his summers in Maine as a youth. He was an adventurous boy who loved to swim in the clear and cold waters there. He graduated from Yale in and, eschewing the cushy Manhattan life suggested for him, set sail for the Dutch East Indies, where he purchased a rubber plantation in He fell in love with a woman named Meta and bought a fifty-foot schooner.

They had a child, John, Jr. When John, Jr. He was an exceptional surfer himself. His surf shop, which bore his name, grew in popularity until it became a globally recognized brand. None of this is true. According to the L. Times , students at a local high school worried that their sports uniforms would engender more legal letters. In an effort to smooth things over, town leaders suggested to Abercrombie that the company open an outlet in Hollister. The company does not have any recollection of this request.

Most of them work on the surrounding farms or in the few nearby factories. Hollister is an unglamorous town, but its name is now associated with some degree of taste and status all over the world. Which is odd, because the town benefits in almost no way from this success.

The rise of the Hollister brand has been especially strange to me, because it was my great-great-grandfather T.

Hawkins who helped found the town of Hollister. Growing up, I was confronted daily by his white-bearded face, in an old photograph that hung in our living room in Illinois. A few feet away, his rifle, which he carried from Missouri to California, rested over our mantel. This is when T. Hawkins was born, the eldest of nine children, his parents farmers, their people having travelled from Ireland and England and Scotland to the early Virginia settlements.

The Hawkins family lived in two adjoining log cabins with one roof covering both. The boys of the family slept in the attic, near the clapboard roof, and listened to the tapping of the rain in the summer. But in the winter when the wind blew the fine snow would drift through the interstices between the boards of the roof. In the morning, we would awake to find the bedding and the floor covered an inch or more in drifted snow.

It seems at this distance a rough life; but I do not remember that we ever considered it so, and it certainly served to make one hardy and self-reliant. They hunted squirrels and quail and the occasional possum, and they ate their own pigs, in bacon and ham form, three times a day, for months on end. You have to assume it was a fabric that breathed.

Hawkins attended the customary one-room schoolhouse, a few months a year, until he was sixteen. At that point, with his younger brothers able to take on his duties at the farm, Hawkins was freed to pursue his education. He tried his hand at teaching, and then medicine, before returning home with three hundred dollars.

I was content to remain idle for a short time, spending my days floating down the Meramec in my canoe or resting under the shade of the trees. But this could not last long, and soon I commenced to look around for something to do.

From our home the nearest village was twenty miles. Scattered here and there was a country store. There was none nearer than seven or eight miles from our place, and I conceived the idea that I could establish myself in the business. I immediately went to work with a carpenter, and by the end of July, I had a building twenty by forty feet, with shelving and counter complete. I had already gone to St.

Louis to a firm who were engaged in the business of furnishing country stores, and as I was entirely ignorant of what I needed, they selected a stock invoicing about two thousand dollars, on which I paid my three hundred dollars, and the balance they carried for me. First, a wholesaler provided T. Second, although Hawkins had no experience in retail sales, the wholesaler was risking the credit, with no collateral.

Third, Hawkins was all of twenty-one years old. The store was successful. As a good many rough characters visited the mountains, it was not considered safe to leave the store, a half mile from the nearest house, over night. The next year, he married Catherine Patton, a well-bred woman from two old Southern families. Within a year, her health began to fail, and their doctor recommended that they move to a milder, drier climate.

Hawkins sold up, and began preparing for a trip out West. By the time he was ready, he and Catherine had a baby, a boy named T. This was not the great emigration of the gold rush, ten years earlier. The Hawkinses saw other wagons only intermittently. They expected to come across ample bison to shoot and eat, but found none; during the journey, they were able to kill only two antelope. Instead, they relied on trade with Indians, with other travellers, and with settlers.

There had recently been a notorious event, the Mountain Meadows massacre, in southern Utah, in which a hundred and twenty men, women, and children from Arkansas were killed by Mormon militias masquerading as Native Americans, and so the Hawkins party joined forces with another wagon train heading West from Illinois. But the Mormons they encountered as they neared Salt Lake were friendly, Hawkins wrote. As we had been living on bacon and salt meats, with no vegetables for so long, I sought out a large house which I thought gave promise of affluence.

I knocked on the front door, but received no answer, so I went to the back of the house, where under a tree sat a large, solid-looking man with a babe on each knee, while a dozen other children, from two to eight years, were playing around. Two women were washing clothes in the same tub, while a third was hanging them the clothes, not the women out to dry.

It was my first view of polygamy. The man, as all others I met later, looked fat and happy, while all the women looked tired and careworn. They travelled across the Bear River, and only then did they experience the kind of hardship and tragedy that all Western travellers had come to expect. In the Illinois company was a dare-devil of a young man, and when the cattle were well into the river he followed them on his horse.

He had about reached the middle, the horse swimming gallantly, when the man and horse suddenly disappeared. After a time the horse came to the surface further across, but we never saw the young man again. We camped on the bank and all hands turned out to search for the body. The ferryman assured us that it was entirely useless, that Bear River never gave up its dead.

They traversed the Sierra Nevadas. Hawkins finally arrived in Mountain View in The health of Catherine Hawkins initially improved, but she died less than two years after the journey.

To some, this would have seemed like a cruel trick played by a malevolent god. But Hawkins decided to stay in California. I realized, however, that hard work and unceasing work was the only panacea for me. Hawkins bought two hundred acres just north of Gilroy and married Emma Day, the daughter of a farmer.

In , they had their first child, Charles, and by Hawkins was a father of four and a prosperous farmer. Though he was largely self-taught, that year he shipped, he wrote, ten thousand centals of wheat to San Francisco. Hawkins soon heard about a Colonel W. Hollister, who owned twenty-one thousand acres of agricultural land nearby. For many years, that land had been in the hands of Spanish clergy, after most of its Native American inhabitants had been expelled or drawn into the mission system.

When Mexico gained independence from Spain, much of it was given to Mexican soldiers and settlers. By the end, he had only a few thousand left, but when the Civil War began Hollister made a fortune selling wool that outfitted the Union Army. By , Hollister was ready to sell his property, part of a ranch known as San Justo.

Hawkins organized a group of local farmers to buy the parcel for three hundred and seventy thousand dollars. They split the land into fifty tracts, leaving a hundred acres in the center for a town site. They were about to name the town San Justo when one of the men objected. Does every town in California have to be named after a saint? Hawkins had one more child, and gave up farming to establish the Bank of Hollister. Eventually, his five children had eleven children among them, and all but one thrived.

It now owns a chain of stores around the world and sells online. Hollister Co. It is now an entity for retailing trending items, targeting many countries, including Canada, Japan, France, Spain, Australia, the Netherlands, and others.

Over the twenty years of its existence, the corporate emblem has hardly changed, completely preserving visual authenticity. To attract buyers and increase interest in the brand, the company placed its symbols on labels and prints.

This was due to an increase in consumer demand since T-shirts with large logos were in fashion at the beginning of the century. But over time, management noticed a 9 percent drop in sales and began looking for a reason. It turned out that the trends have changed, and a different style is now in use, for which the teenage environment is incredibly demanding.

As a result, in , its design was slightly corrected. She causes the key associations that the manufacturer strives for: drive, energy, relaxation, rest. And all because the image of a sea bird gives rise to pictures of the coastal zone, salty breeze, soft sand, warm surf. The second reason for choosing a seagull emblem is the freedom that young people aspire to.